Healthcare Analytics Summit™ Day Two Recap

Keynote: Day 1 review through analytics

Tom Burton started day 2 by delivering the stats from the opening day of the Healthcare Analytics Summit. First topic? Twitter. More than 1,000 tweets were associated with #HASummit14 on the first day, with four strong themes emerging: 1) the need to make a case for analytics in your organization; 2) quality vs. cost and increasing quality while decreasing waste; 3) patient experience; and 4) the need for courage to use analytics.

Culture, relationships and analytics are inextricably tied, said Steve Barlow, and it’s important to recognize that “Culture is King.” Steve also had the data to back up his assertions: attendees of HAS14 who felt that their organizations had a strong relationship between physician and leadership were more likely to report a strong rating of quality improvement at their organization, too.

Keynote: How Allina Uses Analytics to Transform Care

Where do you want to get sick? Near an Allina Health facility, says Modern Healthcare. The sentiment is echoed by Allina’s Dr. Penny Wheeler. But while the success at Allina Health is truly impressive, Dr. Wheeler acknowledged that her organization still has a long way to go.

Dr. Wheeler shared her excitement about value-based payments becoming more and more a part of Allina’s revenue stream. Right now, 80 percent of what they do is linked to Pay-For-Performance – but it still accounts for only 3 percent of the revenue. When that number reaches 50 percent, said Dr. Wheeler, they’ll truly be driving outcome for the people they’re treating.

Dr. Wheeler ended her discussion with a heartfelt reminder of why we’re all doing what we do. Because beyond the graphs, the charts, the visualization, healthcare is about improving lives and reducing suffering. She congratulated the audience on a job well done – now and in the future.

Click to Enlarge Infographic

Keynote: The Imperative of Linking Clinical and Financial Data to Improve Outcomes

Jenny Jones was six-years-old when Dr. Macias saw her in the ER at Texas Children’s Hospital. Her mom brought her in for asthma problems, but, much to Dr. Macias’s surprise, it wasn’t because Jenny wasn’t following her prescribed action plan. She was. But Jenny had SIX action plans – all from Texas Children’s Hospital and all, to some degree, contradicting one another.

Dr. Macias’s realization ultimately led to the implementation of a data management strategy at Texas Children’s that included analytics, a clinical content system, and a deployment system. But Dr. Macias stressed that, even more important than any of these three systems alone, is the interface between all three. Once that’s achieved, it’s possible to find population health solutions for the Jennys of the world and to give patients the right evidence-based action plan for their specific concerns.

An Accountable Care Transformation Framework

Dr. David A. Burton, Health Catalyst Sr. Vice President

Dr. David Burton says the move to Accountable Care will happen, and he wants organizations to know how to succeed in Accountable Care. To do so, Dr. Burton stresses that organizations enter into partnerships based on these five key building blocks of population health management (plus a sixth that helps market the asset):

Infrastructure

Population Evaluation

Provider Network

Quality and Safety

Waste Reduction

As the attendees admitted they’re only somewhat prepared for population health management, Dr. Burton stressed concepts including the Pareto principle (for finding opportunity) and contracting strategies. Contracts with payers should focus on each party’s strength. For the full-conference crowd, this session also included a bonus – a 75+-page book restating and explaining the details of the presentation. If you haven’t already, download the Accountable Care Transformation Framework book now.

How Stanford Uses Analytics to Improve Outcomes in Population Health and HF Readmissions Reduction

Dr. Bryan Bohman and Yohan Vetteth of Stanford Health Center (SHC) stressed the importance of a multidisciplinary approach to implementing an analytics platform by including physicians, IT and analytics. Changing the medical culture is no small task, but it’s an absolute necessity to achieve quality improvement. To change the medical culture, we have to convince physicians of the importance of analytics and to demonstrate to them that it’s possible to achieve strong outcomes.

To accomplish this, Stanford created multi-functional collaborative teams. To ensure engagement, the physicians are integrated from the very beginning of their quality initiatives. For example, at the outset of an initiative they define the cohort and the evidence-based interventions as a team, which helps keep everyone engaged through the process.

At Stanford, they also implemented a risk stratification model for population health management, enabling them to stratify population risk and identify areas to focus on. They developed a Primary Care Model to measure and improve outcomes where each primary care physician can benchmark his or her own practice against other practices and against SHC overall. They can also drill down to assess an individual patient’s population risk.

SHC also uses a Heart Failure Dashboard that is aimed at lowering readmissions. On the dashboard they measure rates of medication reconciliation, follow-up phone calls, medication review/teach back, and discharge appointments. By measuring and encouraging the increase of these rates, Stanford has been able to achieve a decrease in 30-day readmissions from 19.6 percent to 12 percent.

How to Drive Clinical Improvement that Gets Results

Tom Burton, Health Catalyst Co-Founder

Not all sessions are created quite the same. Take Tom Burton’s session on driving clinical quality improvement. It was unlike any other session at HAS14. Burton’s goal was to help an organization create lasting, effective clinical improvement initiatives. He’d illustrate how through the following hands-on, fun exercises, each intended to help drive the messages home.

Deal or No Deal: using the Pareto Principle to choose the right initiative and prioritize projects based on process size and variation.

Popsicle Bomb: measure and understand variation, then introduce a standard best practice to reduce that variation.

Water Stopper: improve data quality by fixing the problem at the source.

Paul Revere’s Ride: choose the right influencers to create team engagement.

Popsicle bombs away. It’s amazing how much faster you can solve a simple puzzle when you see someone else do it first.

Key Principles and Approaches To Population Health Management

It’s good to know your audience, which is why this session started with a series of polls, one of which indicated that 66 percent of the attendees in the room were in a population health initiative; another reflected that only 34 percent of the attendees said their initiative was “somewhat” successful at best. Dr. Greg Spencer wasn’t one of them – because Crystal Run Healthcare’s population health management initiative IS successful.

But that wasn’t always the case. While the organization has had a BI department for quite some time, the department initially focused its efforts on pulling financial reports. The information-hunting/gathering stage was time consuming until Crystal Run added an enterprise data warehouse (EDW) meeting the following criteria:

The EDW had to be controlled by Crystal Run

No “black box” – Crystal Run wanted to know what was inside

Vendor with prior healthcare experience

Modern technology

Vendor/product with an established track record

Partner who would teach Crystal Run to fish for itself

Afterward, Dr. Sreekanth Chaguturu, MD shared Partners Healthcare’s success and indicated that the organization is now focusing on investing in high risk care by using predictive analytics to determine who will be at high risk of becoming high cost. Dr. Chaguturu’s prediction for the next frontiers in population health included managing mental health (it may have the greatest financial opportunity) and developing patient-reported outcomes.

Getting an ROI out of Your Healthcare Analytics Projects

Leslie Falk asked the question first: “If there’s no goal, how is it possible to know if the goal has been achieved?” To better understand how to develop measurable goals, Falk and team jumped in with an activity in which attendees worked as groups to develop Aim statements.

Attendees develop Aim statements

Next, Bobbi Brown shared the formula for ROI and discussed the importance of measuring ROI in hospital improvement initiatives. Then Brown talked about the three categories of waste along with the indirect and direct benefits of identifying waste. Her exercise – “Show Me the Money” gave each participant a dollar for identifying a type of waste.

John Henderson then explained how Texas Children’s Hospital leveraged its EHR subsystem along with an EDW and analytics applications to improve outcomes and operations. For example, they’ve saved an average of 67 percent on labor costs and their average time to build reports declined from 97 hours to under 30 hours.

There Is a 90% Probability That Your Son Is Pregnant: Predicting the Future of Predictive Analytics

Dale Sanders, Health Catalyst Sr. Vice President

Dale Sanders outlined the future of predictive analytics in healthcare while also drawing parallels between nuclear operations and healthcare.

Before reading further, you should watch this documentary, which premiered at the Healthcare Analytics Summit: https://vimeo.com/106905323

Key people featured in the documentary, Dale Sanders, Dr. Chandy Abraham, and Gene Thompson, were available for Q&A afterward.

The documentary explains the building of Health City at Cayman Islands. It’s a hospital offering high-quality care at very reduced prices, built with the vision and leadership of Dr. Devi Shetty, a cardiac surgeon who started similar successful projects in India. The Cayman Islands project is supported by Narayana Health and U.S.-based Ascension.

One big difference that led to the success of this projects was that only a few people directed and guided it. Gene Thompson, an entrepreneur with no prior experience in healthcare, steered the project. However, he and Dr.

Shetty knew that too many doctors would have held things up. “The most powerful thing for me going into this project was ignorance,” Thompson explained.

The building has no marble floors or grandiose architecture; it features environment-friendly technologies like an onsite sewage system. “When we built and designed the hospital, we did nothing radical. It’s only radical for healthcare,” says Thompson. And Dr. Abraham took it a step further saying, “for success, we need a love triangle with the government, private businesses and providers.”

In the end, the overall message was high-quality care costs less with data-driven focus. Technology must drive down costs in healthcare, not make it more expensive.

Closing keynote: Dan Burton, Health Catalyst Chief Executive Officer

Dan Burton wrapped up this first-ever Healthcare Analytics Summit with a heartfelt thank you to all attendees. His hope was that we would all reflect on what was most impactful for us and what we would now do differently to improve healthcare in the future. Healthcare is personal and a cause worth fighting for each of us can make a difference. Using data as a foundation for change, we can now choose to act and do things differently in ways that persuade and win over hearts and minds.